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Sunday, July 27, 2014

Falling In Love with Close Reading Study: Chapter 4 If You Build It

Reading Falling in Love with Close Reading has forced me to be more reflective and critical of my practice last year. I'm now pretty sure that I never taught my students to read closely. I just expected them to read the same piece of writing several times before responding to text dependent questions. I never explicitly taught them what they should be doing in these re-readings.

On page 54, the authors return to the routine of reading through a lens, finding patterns and developing a new understanding of the text. Through this routine, the authors give us a framework to explicitly teach our students to reread a text. In the narrative that follows, the authors explain that they might study the lenses on one day, and work with patterns and ideas on the second day. This is a definite departure from my classroom practice as we would work with one portion of text each day and would not return to that portion of text again.

In this routine, students first use a lens to study the text. Examples of lenses:
* descriptions
* dialogue between characters
* flashbacks
* definition of a term

In the lesson narrative, the authors teach students to take note of the different parts of the text and invite the students to notice portions of text that are descriptive and portions of text that have dialogue.

If you've been following along with the book study, you'll notice that this ritual is the same as used for word study and for reading for text evidence. There are always three parts to the ritual. You'll also notice in this chapter the expectation that we teach students to use domain specific and genre specific vocabulary when discussing text.

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